Comment on Important News - Geoblocking of the UK
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Thanks for the clear post.
If anyone on here signs up at feddit.uk be sure to mention it in your reply.
For other OSA discussion, I’ve started a community to help everyone working through and figuring out how to comply with the legislation: !onlinesafetyact@feddit.uk
Compliance by non-service will be the best way for anyone who can afford to lose UK users for an undetermined amount of time.
It’s the easiest way and it pushes people to do something about it. Either by instigating change or working around it to make it publicly ineffective.
Complying the ‘proper’ way only normalises the draconian legislation. It is not normal, and frankly the folk need to be told as such.
I’m afraid we don’t have a choice about compliance with the rules. We are the largest UK Lemmy instance (so geoblocking isn’t an option) and, if we did ignore the laws, we’d be hit with ruinous fines.
Given the size of the feddit instance, the general geolocation of the users, and that most fedi users are at least somewhat technically switched on - your position is even less enviable than Demigodrick’s.
As a user, all the verification options suggested in legislation are unacceptable. Sites that implement such checks would also become unacceptable by association. I’d rather see a hard lesson taught, as this instance has chosen to do.
Comply and upset the users. Dont comply and upset the gov. The users don’t have a stick with which to beat you, so I suppose for you compliance it is. Do you yet what compliance is going to look like for feddit?
A large portion of users tend to come in waves, fleeing what they see as overbearing bad behaviour from their previous homes. I am one of them. I expect a lot of users will migrate to less discerning instances if your compliance method doesn’t pass the sniff test, and I can’t forsee any method managing that and keeping in line with legislation.
If you see a significant enough level of migration, would you bite the bullet and just shut up shop for the UK anyway? What’s the point in investing in compliance methods if the core userbase decides to move away?
Sorry for the jaded speculative babble, I’m just really interested in seeing how this is all going to pan out.
Do you yet what compliance is going to look like for feddit?
Behind what we are currently doing (NSFW filter on, Lemmy’s own systems, ways to contact Admins directly and AutoMod), so far I think we need:
The law isn’t designed to be onerous for small website owners (and that is pretty much anyone whose membership isn’t in the upper 100s of thousands) and all of the above should exceed the requirements. If not, then it demonstrates we’ve done our homework and improved our processes and documentation (which it seems is the laws intent - it forces you to think about the issues and what you can do about it, when you may have been muddling on through until now), so we are opening a dialogue with The Powers That Be and if there is room for improvement they will let us know, rather than having to get threatening.
If you see a significant enough level of migration, would you bite the bullet and just shut up shop for the UK anyway? What’s the point in investing in compliance methods if the core userbase decides to move away?
I really don’t see it coming to that. It should make no difference to the users of the site. It’s a bit of a time sink for Admins at the moment but, once it is done, it should, hopefully, only require the odd tweak at most.
TheWolfOfSouthEnd@hexbear.net 1 year ago
I’ve already subscribed to this, but thank you creating it. I don’t know all of the implications, I just know the OSA is a crap idea.